We’ve all been there.
You’re running a campaign with a decent budget, but there’s no conversion tracking in place.
Because of that, you can’t quite report more than cost, impressions, CTR, and clicks. As a marketer, that’s not really a spot you wanna be in. Well, unless you could find a way to get close enough to reality without relying on engineering 😉
Here are three ways to achieve that:
1. Use the overall conversion rate of your product: on apps, for example, you can know how many in-app purchases you sell daily in total, but not necessarily by traffic source. In this case, you could take your app’s overall conversion rate and assume your campaigns perform similarly.
2. Ask BI for the number of conversions registered in your products’ database during a given time: let’s say they tell you that you had 92 sales registered on your database last month. If you divide that by the number of visitors you had in the same period, now you got an assumed conversion rate that you could use.
3. You can get a benchmark from a market study: this is not ideal, and I wouldn’t recommend this approach to make any big decisions, but I’ve seen it being used for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Still, if your company doesn’t know how much it’s selling, then maybe that’s a strong signal you might have bigger problems to worry about.
By the way, using assumptions like this (in the right way) is a clear indication of seniority. The opposite is also true. So learning how to feel comfortable with using proxies is a great way to get to a next level in your career.
Extra tip: when reporting results using proxies and assumptions, it’s always a good idea to mention how you got that number somewhere in your presentation.